Recruiters! Don’t Advertise A Job, Market It.

Most recruitment consultants understand the importance of marketing when trying to attract new clients.

Putting together a marketing plan, utilising it and then evaluating its effectiveness should be a core part of your plans to grow your business. However, what many recruiters don’t realise is the effectiveness of marketing when it comes to attracting the very best candidates.

Don’t just advertise your roles on the job boards and hope. Take the time to market your vacancies and you will not just find yourself attracting better quality candidates, but you will find your candidate retention rate will improve, as will your client’s satisfaction.

Marketing each vacancy needn’t be an expensive or time consuming exercise; it’s simply a way of proactively ensuring you are focusing your efforts effectively and successfully. Here are some simple but effective steps you can take to market your roles to candidates more effectively.

What are your objectives?

Clearly, one objective will be to secure an exceptional candidate for your client, one who is perfectly matched to both the role and culture of the organisation in question. But what are your other objectives?

Could filling this vacancy successfully lead to further vacancies from the company? Could you use them as a testimonial or as a reference for other clients? Never be happy with just filling a vacancy, always try and treat it as a catalyst to drive your business forward in some way.

Where will you target to find high calibre candidates?

It’s all to easy as busy recruiters simply to post each vacancy to the usual job sites and wait for the applications to come in. But taking the time to evaluate each vacancy and assess where and how it is best to market it will not only be more effective in finding better quality candidates, it will save you a huge amount of time and will also ultimately save you money.

Consider using specialised job sites, learning how to use LinkedIn to its full capacity and think of other, more creative and abstract ways you can attract the very brightest candidates.  Maybe there are specialist industry internet forums that can be utilised, or specialist industry events you can attend to network?

What are the key messages you need to communicate about the role?

Whether in your job posting or when talking to candidates on the telephone, it is important not to bombard them with too much information about the job. Instead, extract three key features about the job that as a whole sum-up the role in question.

These three key features should be specifics that appeal to the type of candidates you are targeting and can depend on the culture of the company.

You may be highlighting the financial rewards and promotion potential, or you could be showcasing the company’s attitude to flexible working and childcare policies. Understand what sort of people will fit into the organisation successfully and promote what will appeal to them.

Monitoring the results

Monitoring any marketing activity is vital as it can help you focus your future campaigns more effectively. As well as highlighting where the better quality candidates came from, it can also highlight the recruitment channels that aren’t working as well. Information like this is key and can make you a leaner and more efficient recruiter.

So remember, stop advertising your vacancies and start marketing them, and watch the quality of your candidates increase, ensuring that you have the right people to place into the right jobs.

‘Till next time,

Cheryl